Iran blamed for launching cyber attack against BBC to disrupt Persian service

London,
Thu, 15 Mar 2012ANI

London, Mar 15 (ANI): The British Broadcasting Corporation has raised suspicion that a "sophisticated cyber-attack" launched on the media firm could be Iran's efforts to disrupt its Persian service.

In a speech, BBC's Director General Mark Thompson will say that the Internet attack coincided with efforts to jam two of the service's satellite feeds into Iran.

"We regard the coincidence of these different attacks as self-evidently suspicious," he will say.

Some parts of the BBC were unable to access email and other Internet services on March 1.

It is understood that the attack may have been caused by its systems being overwhelmed by a flood of external communication requests - a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack.

According to report, the latest revelation follows a blog post by Thompson in February in which he complained of the "repeated jamming of international TV stations such as BBC Persian TV, preventing the Iranian people from accessing a vital source of free information."

In his speech to the Royal Television Society he will note that on the day of the cyber-attack there had also been an attempt to disrupt the Persian Service's London phone-lines by the use of multiple automatic calls.

The BBC's report came soon after a watchdog 'Reporters Without Borders' complained about Iran's "cyber-army," in its report named "Enemies of the Internet".

The free-speech lobby group reported that Iran and some of the other countries on its register "censor internet access so effectively that they restrict their populations to local intranets that bear no resemblance to the World Wide Web." (ANI)